On the first evening
of the democratic debates in June, Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-Massachusetts) described gun violence as a national public health
emergency that needs to be treated as a serious research problem. “We
need to treat this like a virus that’s killing our children,” she said.
And, of course, the horrifying statistics support her clarion call. Mass
shootings, community-based gun violence, suicides and police shootings
take about 40,000 lives each year in the United States.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December 2012 catapulted
the gun reform debate back to the forefront of American politics. After
each well-publicized mass shooting, the issue enters the news cycle again.

The first democratic debates spent more time discussing gun reform
than climate change, highlighting its prominence as a key issue.
Democrats oftentimes justify strict gun laws around a need to keep
children and public spaces safe from mass shootings. “We must be a country who loves our children more than we love our guns,” Eric Swalwell proclaimed during the second night of the debate.

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The Democratic National Committee’s website page
on “Preventing Gun Violence” offers a similar line: “In a country as
great as ours, no child should be afraid to go to school or walk around
their neighborhood. No spouse should be afraid to come home at night. No
American should be afraid to go to work or their place of worship. And
no human being should be afraid to go to a shopping mall or baseball
field, nightclub or movie theater, concert or college campus.”

Undoubtedly, mass shootings must be addressed, but these spontaneous
horrific acts are responsible for just a sliver of total gun deaths in
the U.S.

Mass shootings, defined by Mother Jones as “indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker,” have taken 339 people’s lives
since 2015. But, within the same time period, police — who are
responsible for enforcing gun laws — have shot and killed 4,355 people,
1200 percent more people than mass shooters.

Infographic: Ella Fassler

The Missing Piece in Gun Violence Debates

Police shootings are gun violence. Yet deaths at the hands of police
were just a footnote in the gun violence section of the presidential
debate, voluntarily acknowledged by just two of the 20 candidates on
stage: Mayor Bill de Blasio and Julian Castro. Castro described
the stark discrepancy in police treatment of white and Black perceived
perpetrators: “Dylann Roof went to the Mother Emanuel AME church, and he
murdered nine people who were worshipping, and then he was apprehended
by police without incident. Well, but what about Eric Garner and Tamir
Rice and Laquan McDonald and Sandra Bland and Pamela Turner and Antonio
Arce?”

The institutional racism rooted in American policing prevents the
public from categorizing police shootings as gun violence, Natacia
Knapper with Stop Police Terror Project DC explained to Truthout
via email. “A large swath of people in our nation — white people in
particular, but many others as well — don’t want to reckon with the
horrors police have caused in communities of color because to do this
would call into question the entire way we have viewed these systems and
their roles in our society.” News media consumption, television shows
and movies constantly reinforce the belief that policing is an
irreplaceable institution keeping society safe and stable. Unlearning
this “truth” is akin to unlearning that the Earth is round. Knapper
continued, “For many Americans, I think it’s easier to compartmentalize
the type of gun violence that comes from the police as “other” and
incidents that result in the brutalizing and death of American citizens —
Black, Brown or otherwise — are treated as individual instances that
are not connected to a larger, overarching problem.” Police and the
media exploit this divide when they describe the police violence
victims’ unrelated criminal history or the victims’ possession of a gun
or pocket knife, regardless of whether it was a factor during the
killing. The underlying message is that the deceased deserved to die in
order to keep everyone else safe.

But Knapper asks: “Who and/or what do they actually keep safe? “An
institution that was birthed from snatching the path to freedom from our
Black ancestors and guarding property above all else leaves little room
for protecting humanity.”

Framing police gun violence, particularly against communities of
color, as a separate issue allows for a perpetuation of the idea that
police can be reformed out of racist violence. But since racist violence
is a part of law enforcement, its true elimination would lead to the
abolition of the institution. Incorporating police killing into larger
gun violence discussions complicates matters — police are supposed to
enforce gun laws but are committing gun violence on a shocking level
themselves. Can an institution founded on “snatching the path to
freedom” from Black individuals be trusted with the task of maintaining
the peace?

Author and anarchist organizer scott crow doesn’t think so. “More
strict gun laws will harm Black and Brown communities,” he told Truthout during a phone interview. “Invariably
all laws do. All laws are arbitrary, bureaucratic, reactionary and
selectively enforced. All laws. More often than not the legislation that
comes out has more harmful and unintended consequences and outcomes
than what they are meant to correct, or it’s just never enough because
the bill is more watered down by corporate interests and other various
stakeholders by the time it comes out,” he said. And police reinforce
the dominant culture when they enforce these laws, according to crow.
Police are supposed to enforce gun laws but are committing gun violence on a shocking level themselves.

Part
of crow’s own story reflects the selective enforcement of laws. In 2002
he decided to buy a gun through the state system. He fit the background
check criteria. He had only been arrested for civil disobedience and
had never been convicted of a felony. But whenever he tried to buy a
gun, the dealer held his background check and told him to come back.
When he returned, the dealers would refuse to sell him a gun, and they
couldn’t explain why. Time and time again. Finally, one dealer fessed
up. The FBI had been visiting each dealer scott visited. “This is very
much what the KGB would have done. The gun dealers weren’t allowed to
tell me,” crow told Truthout. After filing a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI, he was able to go through
his 440-page file and confirm this was the truth. In 2001 the FBI
flagged him as having a “predicate for violence,” despite having no
evidence to substantiate the claim, and surveilled him for years.

Crow and an uncountable number of left-wing activists have lived
through constant FBI and state police harassment; yet, it is unclear
whether white supremacists had similarly giant FBI files prior to the
day they unloaded on a mosque or church (it seems unlikely). The FBI
ignored a tip about the Parkland shooter, a white male. This isn’t to
say the FBI should have files on everyone, but the centuries-old police
legacy of prioritizing political dissidents over white supremacist male
violence is predictive.

Other, relatively new gun reforms such as “Red Flag” laws or ERPOs
(Extreme Risk Protection Orders), which Beto O’Rourke heralded as a tool
for decreasing gun violence during the debates, can be analyzed through this predictive framework. Fifteen
states have passed these laws, which allow law enforcement, and — in
some states — mental health professionals, family and friends, to file a
petition with the court explaining why a person in possession of a
firearm is a danger to themselves or others. If a judge approves the
petition, law enforcement can immediately seize the firearm. Red Flag
laws are intended to save lives, but there may be unintended
consequences too. From October 2018 to January 2019, 302 Red Flag Law
protection orders were issued in Maryland. Maryland police shot and
killed at least one man while seizing his gun (he was white). Police are
not trained in mediation or mental health services.

Considering law enforcement’s inherent racial bias and the
surveilling of political dissidents, it is reasonable to envision a
future where Black folks and rebels (especially Black rebels) are,
ultimately, the primary targets of extreme risk protection orders.

If Not Police or Laws, Then What?

The gun violence debate, currently framed as one of gun control
versus gun freedom, simplifies a complex problem. According to crow, the
NRA has heavily influenced the narrative from all angles and is largely
responsible for crafting a diluted discussion intended to build
constituencies around gun use. Nonprofits secure funding by being
“pro-gun” or “anti-gun” and politicians gain or lose support based on
the same binary. This reductionist conversation, driven by electoralism,
disallows the U.S. from having more nuanced discussions about the role
that patriarchy, economic inequality, racism and police play in the gun
violence crisis.

The possible solutions that result from these conversations aren’t
politically expedient. In regard to intra-community violence, Knapper
said, “The sad truth is if we poured in the same amount of money into
affordable housing, accessible mental health services, fully implemented
violence interruption within every single impacted community, workforce
development and job opportunities as we do into policing — and in fact,
divest from the police and pour those funds into those resources — a
lot would change.”

Related research backs her up. The Brennan Center’s research shows
that in a city of 100,000, each new resource-providing nonprofit
community organization leads to a 1.2 percent drop in the homicide rate.
And income inequality is the best predictor of homicide rates. A 2018 study
compiled data across 3,144 U.S. counties and found that mass shootings
(using a very broad definition of three or more victims with injuries)
were most likely to occur with high levels of income inequality and high
levels of income. This data, which doesn’t require law enforcement to
implement, is rarely (if ever) discussed by politicians. Many seemingly
prioritize police over public services. For example, Chicago’s 2019 budget
allots over 1.5 billion dollars to the police department; the city’s
entire “Community Services” infrastructure, which includes offices like
the Department of Public Health and the Department of Family and Support
Services, is allotted nearly $200,000 dollars.

Feminist author Rebecca Solnit identified yet another glaringly absent piece of discussion around violence in her book, Men Explain Things to Me:
“Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for the
United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is
still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.”

Culturally, this is incredibly important, yet it’s almost taboo to
discuss it. It is difficult to imagine a “Reducing Toxic Masculinity”
issue page on the DNC website. But Knapper told Truthout this
is exactly what we need to unpack: “The violence that our society
equates with being a ‘real man’ and deep-rooted misogyny that leaves men
feeling entitled to women and femmes in a way that moves them to
violence when that entitlement isn’t satisfied.”

This isn’t easy work, and considering partners of police are two to four times more likely
to experience domestic abuse (oftentimes involving service weapons) it
isn’t work the police can realistically take on. Case in point:
Recently, in Florida, police charged a woman with burglary and trespassing for turning in her abusive husband’s guns after they filed for divorce.

Once more people begin to think about addressing conflict and
violence outside of the criminal legal system, new solutions may emerge
that were once invisible. Thankfully, these conversations, and the
necessary organizing work that accompanies them, do not ultimately need
corporate debate stages to materialize.